Just need to store events, so no need for 24h storage. Also not really interested in recognition software, just motion activation is enough.
What is the best brand that allows our own cloud (no subscriptions)?
Thanks
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Motioneye - this was my go to before frigate. Worked perfectly and easy to setup. Playback was slow(5yrs ago) so I switched. Not sure of its state now but it was very well designed
Shinobi - it seems decent but in never could get it running well. This was my setup issue. That said, from the short amount I used it it looked promising
Frigate - what I use now. Works very well, playback is smooth and fast. Lots of options. It mostly for onject detection but pretty sure you can setup to capture motion only.
I’d avoid Reolink unless all your cams are wired. The wireless/battery cams don’t support ONVIF. Unfortunately I purchased a few based off bad information. Synology struggles with them as well. 
UPDATE
If you invest in the Reolink Home Hub or Home Hub Pro , the battery powered cams now work with HA.
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others told me reolink are the best for integration in home assistant …? Ok noted not the wireless ones
I love their cams, battery style don’t support the functions necessary.
***i still use 3 on my property because the night vision is solid
I use ZoneMinder running on my local cloud to capture and process my various camers. You can add code to it that will do object detection. It’s a great feature if you decide to make your smart house also act as an alarm system. I have a couple of these FOSCAM camera’s inside the house. I like the Dahua N24CB33 controlled via Onvif as an outside camera. As I’ve had these camera’s for multiple years you’d probably need a newer model. If you want the cameras outside the most important thing you should do is use a separate IR source so you don’t end up with spiders in front of the camera in warm weather. The FOSCOM cameras require you to use their app to set them up, but once set up you can process the stream locally.
I use Amcrest POE cams. Avoid wireless models.
I turn off IR and set to color only, never black and white. The low light performance is good enough where if you are in city with street or house lights it’ll be better than b/w with led. I’m in country with virtually zero light and moonlight is enough in many cases.
Can anyone chime in on why I should avoid wireless models for security cameras?
Wired it always best but wireless is acceptable
The amcrest wireless models tend to require third party so and cloud which is an absolute no.
Wireless can be easily disabled/jammed using EMF noise. Some robbers are now carrying around wifi jammers.
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What is a good solution when wired isn’t a feasible option?
I have 3 locations where cameras are going that wired is completely doable, but 2 locations where its simply not feasible. Can I make wireless work, sub-optimally, or am I completely SOL with covering the parts of my property that aren’t near enough to anything except a Wifi signal?
You can wire anything. But is it worth it?
If camera is close enough to connect to WiFi with Excellent signal, not just good, then WiFi is OK. Else you should not use WiFi camera and instead find method to reliably extend your network to space.
I think wired is best case. If you can’t or simply don’t feel like trenching or crawling in some small space it is not a big deal.
WiFi cameras at long distances are spotty. They work well enough but covering multiple WiFi spots that are outside of home can lead to a mess of repeaters or APs.
I will use my home as example
I have an entry gate 200’ from house. I need cameras at the gate. I tried adding AP outside of home but that distance was too much. Trenching wire would be a pain. I made wifi bridge using Unifi AP Nano. WiFi bridge is almost equal to wire due to signal strength, data throughput and reliability. I now have multiple cameras and RasPi in that area with >1GBPS connection and no dropouts.
I have similar scenerio at back of my home except only 100’ and just need to watch small area with goats. Reliability was not super important. I used 2 WiFi cameras in the area but uptime was about 60-70% due to poor signal. I replaced this with AP meshed to AP in home, POE switch and wired camera. This is significantly more stable and uptime is now over 95% and maybe 99. I may use bridge here in future but currently all works well so why bother.
WiFi is not the problem. Signal strength is and really if signal is good is probably close enough to wire. Remember that signal strength determines throughput so if signal is poor, image quality and reliability drop out.
Before I used Bridge and mesh AP to extend network i tried adding and moving APs in my brick/stucco/concrete home. This left me with bad WiFi inside and outside my home. Ultimately I set APs in home to work well for in the home and determined extending network to central locations outside and adding network switches at that location allowed was better option. This is now my recommendation for remote areas. Generally people limit their options to accommodate a problem. By adding the centralized switch it greatly expanded the number and types of devices I could add.
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Thank you for the explanation. Many places I found via Google said wifi = no, but never really a reason why. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.
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Which cameras did you use with MotionEye? I am only looking for motion detection and snapshot capabilities, not continuous recording.
Some cheap Chinese brand Ssying. They were horrible. About 5 back then
Used Unifi, Amcrest and others short term when testing for replacement models. motioneye works well with any rtsp camera stream.
My only issue with it was UI was painfully slow. And I’m running dual Xeon with a ton of ram. It was inefficient but that’s almost 7ths ago
I’m considering trying it out again to see what’s changed. Its UI management was really good I felt. If it added object detection and images loaded faster in Ui it would be top notch
I’m less interested in MotionEye than the cameras themselves. We moved recently and I left the 4 Eufy cameras for the new owners. They worked ok, but it was a lot of work to get them working with HA.
When we moved to the new place I bought 3 wireless Reolink with the HomeHub because everyone says they have the best integration to HA, but could not get them working because of firmware incompatibility between the camera and HomeHub, and a nightmare to upgrade. Thankfully Amazon accepted them as returns.
So I’m back looking for a camera that will trigger on motion and take a snapshot. I do not need continuous video.
I just tried out but ultimately returned for refund a Reolink E1 Outdoor hoping the video quality would be better than my Tapo C210/C211s which have very blocky motion compression and don’t have optical zoom.
Despite the ‘outdoor’ moniker, it works fine indoor table-top or ceiling mount as well as wall mount and since the mount connects to the camera base using a standard tripod screw you can use other off-the-shelf options too. You can flip the image verically and horizontally so you can mount the camera sideways on rather than vertically up or down although hanging vertically-down is required to avoid rainwater ingress into the speaker grill.
Features seem to tick all the boxes - 3x optical zoom, automatic or manual optical (mechanical) focus, configurable auto-track on motion/vehicle/person etc., wired/wired+wifi-backup/wifi-only connection, 2.4/5GHz wifi, onboard FTP client that records to remote FTP(S) server, local SD card record, time-lapse record, very configurable regarding visible and IR LED floods automatic & manual contol and an onboard web server from which you can configure pretty much everything without having to install the app - although the app is fine and doesn’t require you to create an account or go cloudy.
The Reolink HA integration exposes most of the functionality and the ONVIF integrations makes the PT usable. The Reolink just gives you start/stop pan/tilt HA button entities which are pretty useless whereas ONVIF actions on the ONVIF camera entities work but only in continuous-motion mode using the time parameter, not anything else.
However even using go2rtc with the RTSP endpoints via a gigabit Ethernet connection the camera streams were very laggy. Two streams are provided which they call ‘clear’ and ‘fluent’ which basically means higher-res awful latency and low-res poor latency. Even ignoring this, just looking at what the camera body was doing demonstrated very poor lag between issuing an ONVIF PTZ command and the camera actually moving.
The lag might be okay for some but even my Tapo C210/C211 cameras have better PT performance and better stream latency as long as I use go2rtc. Since I’m using HA, the onboard web server is redundant.
So all I’d be benefitting from would be waterproofing, optical zoom, better video compression (at the expense of latency and 4:3 not 16:9) & FTP backup. Given that the Reolink E1 optical zoom models cost at least three-and-a-half times what a C211 costs, I think I’ll look elsewhere.
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